There are few books I dislike, but this book was one of the few that came close. While I enjoyed some of Austin's imagery, it seemed she went around in circles and never get to a destinaton. It was like reading a bunch of settings, but never getting any plot. The highlight of the book was Seyavi, the basket maker but the book itself seemed to be lacking. If you're looking for nature writing, read Linda Hogan's "Dwellings." It's a lot more personal.

I used to live write down the street from Mary Austin's old house in the Owen's Valley. I found her life very interesting and maybe from reading this book you get more of an inside on what her life was like.

Austin lived in the Owens Valley during a turbulent period at the turn of the century, and she observes the people and wild things dwelling there with a novelist's eye. But what sets this gem above all the rest is simply her writing, the plain beauty of her voice and phrasing. She achieves a tone that is somehow at once wistful and tinged with levity, very gently ironic yet always loving. Her words caress their subjects like -- well, like the pen and ink drawings that graced the original publication in 19-ought-whatever. They evoke all the richness of the place, its austerity, its pathos, its beauty, with a gentle affection that is sweet but never cloying, sometimes sad but never downcast. It has a kind of Zen translucency, filtered through the gently humorous, sensitive lens of a literary genius.

For both the novice and the experienced, this book offers triathletes all they need to know to finish the race ahead of the pack. There's detailed information on how to rate yourself physically in swimming, bicycling, and running and refine your skills at each; how to improve fitness for peak performance; develop a training program; keep a training log; cope with hazards and avoid injury; select the right apparel and equipment; eat properly in training and during the race; and condition the "mental muscle" as well as your heart--There is a great section on training using your heart rate monitor that is particularly informing for those just getting started with a heart rate monitor--all in all, I thought it was very complete, precise and to the point--Lots of good tips and helpful information for the Newbie and more experienced. I keep it handy for referencing and recommend it to those who are new to the sport or looking for ways to improve.

I became hooked on this book when I did my first Triathlon last autumn. I felt it gave me the information I needed and the upbeat way it was presented just added to my excitement. I can tell that the author is completely in love with triathlon and wants to see others have the same kind of fun she does. I keep this book handy and have referred to it several times this spring as I train for the three tri's I plan to do this summer. The book is my main triathlon reference and I very much recommend it.

As a newby to the sport it was nice to read a book that gave me an overview of what I could expect. I had only done 2 races when I read this book and it really helped me understand what I was doing right and wrong. If you want an overview of the sport and are planning to do your first race this is a MUST BUY!!

Sally does a great job of explaining all the ins/outs of the sport and provides a good base of knowledge. She provides resources to more information on specific subjects which is helpful.

This book has what Peterson's "Mexican Birds" lacks: good colour pictures of (nearly) all birds of Mexico and adjacent areas and their Spanish names. However, the presentation of the pictures is a mishmash. The descriptions of the birds are not detailed but very short. It is a pity that there is no information about the behaviour of the birds, often very important for identification.

We used this book on a recent trip to Belize. It is THE book in use by local Belizian birding enthusiasts, and we only saw it for sale at one shop during our 12 day stay, so it might be hard to get once you're there. Birds of same species on different color plates slow you down, but the pictures are very good. Highly recommend taking this book with you if you plan to do any serious birdwatching.

This field guide will enable you to see paintings of all of the birds that occur in the area. It also discusses (briefly) each bird. The paintings are excellent and the copy is quick and to the point. To pick at nits, though, the arrangement of the paintings is confusing. Not all birds in a specific family are illustrated on the same plate, and some are found pages away from the rest of their family. The logic seems to be that if the bird is found regularly in northern North America (the elegant trogon, for example) its picture does not need to run with the rest of its relatives. Close study of the guide can overcome this problem, however, making it an easy, economical way to pack the information of other guides into the field.

Long needed, a well written and well organised field guide to the birds of the Philippines is finally available. The 72 color plates illustrate all the species of the islands. A nice color distribution map and a short summary of status and occurance, along with identification information is opposite each image.

Unfortunatly the book follows the current trend in bird guides of using more than one illustrator. The result, though well done in some other books, often results in a clash of styles, and worse, inconsistancy. This book is illustrated by twelve artists and suffers a little from the latter. The work here is uneven, some of the illustrators being better at capturing the look of the birds than others. The proportions, build, and "facial expression" are not correctly drawn for many species. Experienced birders will have fewer problems translating what they are seeing in their binoculars to what is on the color plate. But beginners and more casual observers may encounter some frustration. For example, the figure of the Citrine Flycatcher on plate 62 resembles the bird only in general color pattern. This species usually appears brighter, and you would not be far wrong if your impression on seeing it, is of an all yellow bird. Also, given the head size, the body should be shown slightly larger and more filled out. The folded wing is incorrectly drawn, as are those of every other bird on the plate. Though not unique to this guide, many of the species that have olive or yellow-green upperparts are shown too dull and gray. The White-eyes on plate 70 for instance are bright, trim little characters, that may remind North American birders of Wood Warblers, not the dull, misshapen things depicted.

My guess is that so many illustrators are being used to save time, and perhaps the money needed to pay a really good one to produce 70 or 80 plates. Whatever the reasons, the result here are some illustrations that betray a lack of knowledge of the form of birds that really shouldn't be in a modern field guide. Not with the high standards achieved in other works, which this book otherwise seems to meet.

Despite these problems, all of the plates are adequate for identifying the birds, indeed, many are quite well done, and the authors and artists have produced a work of lasting value. It certainly will be a useful book in the field or reference on the shelf.

This book is definitely the best field guide yet that came out of press. The plates are good and rendered better. Although, what is lacking is the description of the different races of each bird. Only the nominate race is described and I still have to refer to the book "Philippine Birds" by DuPont for the info lacking in this book. Still waiting for a better one.

Although I agree with Mike Ramos on the quality of the text of this book, I disagree with him concerning plate quality. Often multiple artists can lead to varying quality and lack of uniformity, however in this Philippine guide, which has 12 artists, the plates are surprisingly uniform in layout and generally of very high quality. This book has a winning combination of excellent plates accompanied by clear, concise distributional maps and useful, abbreviated texts all at the users fingertips when the book is opened to a particular plate. There are a few problems with the order and names of authors on the Amazon listing. Robert S. Kennedy is the first author, followed by Pedro C. Gonzales, Edward C. Dickenson Hector C. Miranda, Jr. (his name is incorrect in the Amazon book listing) and Timothy H. Fisher.

I don't believe I've seen more than two of Mazursky's films but I enjoyed his book, especially the juicy chapter on his adventures with the increasingly more bizarre Peter Sellers. This is not a biography, but rather a series of essays about his involvement with different Hollywood people and some chapters about his current life and childhood. Recommended.

An interesting, light and witty Summer read that gives you insight into Mazursky's career and tales of movie production. Mazursky, born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn started out as an actor (Blackboard Jungle), moved on to be a comedy writer (Danny Kaye, I Love You Alice B Toklas) when acting parts were infrequent, and made his directorial debut with Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. My favorite scenes in the book? When a young Mazursky catches his zade eating his bubbe's herring on the afternoon of Yom Kippur; when Eisner and Katzenberg ask Mazursky if he thinks that the I.B. Singer story (Enemies, A Love Story) is too Jewish... maybe it can be about the Cambodian Holocaust instead of the WWII one; when Richard Dreyfus pulls out of the Enemies project; and the creation of Down&Out in Beverly Hills.

I loved reading this book, both from the standpoint of appreciating Paul Mazursky the director of many of my favorite films and reveling in Paul Mazursky the no-holds-barred storyteller. But--and, I'm sorry, there is a 'but'---why devote one sentence to the great Art Carney, who Mazursky calls the most pure actor he'd ever worked with, and then not tell the reader WHY he feels that way about Carney? There are no anecdotes to share about Jill Clayburgh or Robin Williams? Come on, Paul, give! This lapse is mostly compensated for by Mazursky's tales of traveling in the "then" Soviet Union and South America, his memories of working for Danny Kaye and his sharing the bitter and the sweet about his family, his friends and the ups and downs of his life. The chapter about Mazursky's relationship with his mother is especially powerful and a reminder that much of the pathos within even his funniest films came honestly to him. So, five stars for what's here---just would've liked to have seen more!

Two things brought my attention to this book. 1) Edward Hoagland's introductions in well known works of Thoreau and Muir, and 2) my interest in the beautiful expanse of wildness that is British Columbia. The book might be described as "quirky," and I have to wonder whether it was an influence in the creation of the early nineties television series "Northern Exposure" (one of the few TV programs I have ever cared for). Published in 1969, it is the account of a New York* novelist become journalist in the great, wild watersheds of the Stikine and Skeena River systems, waters coursing from the Cassiar Mountains, "from sources known only from aerial photographs, some of them where nobody alive had ever been."
*By the time the footloose essayist Hoagland recorder these images in the summer of 1966, he was already quite widely traveled, and had lived briefly in Hazelton, BC in 1960.
Hoagland renders "portraits" of trappers, merchants, guides, clerics, bush pilots, prospectors, "discoverers", and of the waters and forests that are their homes. He himself often fades from the text, reemerging as a curious anomaly in a world unfamiliar and unusual. In northwest BC, a wilderness "the size of several Ohios" in which the majority of residents are caribou, moose, grizzlies, marmots, wolves, beaver, otter, and lynx, each of the perhaps 1000 human residents, whether Indian or white, might be considered an anomaly. The author gravitates to the old-timers, asking "a dabbler's questions that to me are fun."
This volume is not for every reader. It is very unlike the wilderness travel accounts of Thoreau or Muir (who investigated closely a landscape's flora and geology). Hoagland's attentions here are mostly directed to the local "characters" and to the nuances of the human history of a great wilderness: "... airplanes have made mapping easier than naming nowadays. ... The surveyors of forty years ago did a much better job because they were actually on the spot. Being men of good intentions, they were glad to incorporate Indian names on their maps when they knew them." However, "it's an exceedingly accidental process ... if no Indian accompanied the mapper, or if he wasn't unusually expressive, all the native names slipped through the sieve and were lost right then and there."
The author admits, "I'm no outdoorsman, really," but he is taken with the beauty of northern BC: "Swaying and bucking as on a life raft, we scraped over a further series of ridges and peaks. This was the highest flying we had done; we were way up with the snow so that the cabin was cold. But the sunlight washed the whole sky a milky blue. Everywhere, into the haze a hundred miles off, a crescendo of up-pointing mountains shivered and shook. A cliff fell away beneath us as we crossed the lip. ... There was no chance to watch for game; the plunging land was life enough. It was a whole earth of mountains, beyond counting or guessing at, colored stark white and rock-brown. To live is to see, and although I was sweating against my stomach, I was irradiated. These were some of the finest minutes of my life."
Unlike most books of wilderness travel, this is not a record of the author as a man in the wilderness. It is a series of portraits of the true men and women (mostly men) of the wilderness. At Atlin Lake, for example, we meet three vigorous men in their nineties, one who came to the country during the Rush of 1899. We meet others who had first come to these mountains and rivers in the 1890's. In Hoagland's Journal from British Columbia, the century -- now centuries -- before, seem not so distant.

I just read this account of the author's three month exploration of northwestern B.C. in 1966 after it was recommended as one of the best 25 books of the last 25 years by the magazine Outdoor Canada. Edward Hoagland is a real find for me. I had never heard of him before, but his description by John Updike as "America's best living essayist" is close to the mark. His descriptions of the country and the people go far to preserve the early days of this wild and untamed corner of Canada. I love to read travelogues, and this one rates right up there with the best of them.

This would be a good book for ages 9-14 as it covers the basics only and in a format for the very young.

Easy to read. Lots of information. Great pictures. Well organized. ESL and Special Education students find this to be the most accessible book on Rocks and Minerals.

I'm a wildflower enthusiast who arrived in the Sacramento area about six years ago, and I use this book almost every weekend during the wildflower season in the spring. Its great value is a series of descriptions of places and roads with good wildflowers. These descriptions are organized around the major towns along the Gold Country, from Oroville in the north to Mariposa in the south. The description of each location gives decent directions (I have had to hunt sometimes but I've never failed to locate a destination yet), some local history or color, and an overview of the species that might be there. At the beginning of each town section, Fuaver provides lists that identify the locations that are especially good for kids, for hiking, for the serious botantist, or because of their good flower displays.

The place descriptions make up perhaps the first 40% of the book. The rest of the book provides descriptions and drawings of the various flower species you might see. I use a variety of other books for flower identification so this particular section isn't of much use to me, but it would probably help someone just getting started.

Even though I don't use the second part, this book has been great , giving me lots of good ideas about places to see.

Toni obviously knows all the backroads and trails of the Gold Country where wildflowers bloom in the spring. Her guide is excellent: clear directions; ratings for families with children or for botanists; drawings and descriptions of the plants; mentions of other points of interests near-by. The areas described are primarily along highway 49 including sites near Colfax, Auburn, Placerville, Jackson, down to Mariposa. Have fun - and don't pick the flowers!

This book is a good starting point for anyone beginning their foray into backyard bird feeding and watching. It begins with a short history of birding, goes on to describe the species of birds usually seen in yards, what their habits are, and how to attract them. It also details various feeders and nesters that can be used in yards and shows how to make them yourself. It is pleasant to read as a chapter book, not just a "how-to". The simple b&w illustrations of the birds and habitat elements are helpful.

I bought this book thinking it was going to be a field identification guide, and at first I was disappointed....but as I read on I realized this book is intended to *supplement* a true field guide. And as a supplement, it is absolutely wonderful, particularly in its coverage of state and national parks of Texas. The descriptions are fabulous, and the writing style fun to read, unlike your typical "dry" field guides. I am planning a trip to Big Bend National Park in the fall, and I learned more about the park in two paragraphs than I had from combing 2 books and dozens of web sites. I also like how Kutac will give you the precise streets or stretches of field where certain species were found. My only complaint is the lack of coverage in certain areas (I live in Denton county and it would have been neat to find out what's been spotted here), but I can appreciate that it's very difficult to cover all of Texas in one book. Most of the birding "hot spots," parks, and cities do get treatment, and the information and insights should be very helpful to beginners and experienced birders alike. Perhaps future editions will bring additional contributions to fill in some of the holes.